


Version Control

by Anonymous



Category: Westworld (TV)
Genre: Extremely Dubious Consent, M/M, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:13:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24889708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Bernard asks. Ford obliges.
Relationships: Robert Ford/Bernard Lowe
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7
Collections: Anonymous, Turing Fest 2020





	Version Control

**Author's Note:**

  * For [M J Holyoke (wholeyolk)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wholeyolk/gifts).



I want to remember everything, he tells you, and you oblige him.

It isn't the first time. That had its own fascination, but this is just as rewarding in a different way. Having gone through this with Bernard before means that you can enjoy the progression of emotions across his face. The sequences and thoughts playing in his head are invisible and inaudible to all but him, but you follow along as if they're an old, familiar tune.

You catch your breath just a moment before he does when he pieces together the truth of your sexual encounters. Last time, the images took him by surprise, and the time before that, too. This time, even without the cyclic nature of these revelations apparent to him yet, he seems to be better braced for the shock. From the pattern of his eye movements, he clearly slams a door on a thought - though it is a door now, not a blank wall, and he has no choice but to open another.

You can't be sure, from the way he looks with startled anguish at your mouth, whether he's remembering that kissing that mouth after giving you a thorough and generous blow-job (calibration - could he make it eight minutes precisely between first touching his tongue to your beading head, and ejaculation? He could), or whether he's remembering begging you to suck circles in his skin (you primed him to, because you couldn't remember the flesh impact study), or something else. But while you enjoy the sense of building emotion, of _reaction_ , in the figure in front of you - all of which you inspired - you improvise. You think instead of a time when you fucked him. 

You were still partly clothed, your shirt-cuffs still buttoned. You and he had to make careful arrangements for the difference of size between you, for what your back would permit. Eventually it did seem to work best for him to sprawl on a bed - at the right height, of course, because what kind of place would this company be if it could adjust hosts so precisely but not _furniture_? You'd ordered the room ahead of time.

He thought that time was his first - for anal penetration, anyway. He kept saying clumsy, wondering things about how he felt about wanting to ask this from you. A burbling-brook rhythm. In that encounter you felt he grasped something about the intimacy between you. 

For you, of course, it wasn't just about the sex, touch, arousal, gratification, completion. It was about the experience of watching Bernard reconfigure you in his mind as someone with whom he had that kind of relationship. Watching Bernard consequentially reinvent himself.

It's enjoyable to watch him now as he works through all of that. Catharsis cubed, or perhaps represented in four dimensions. Of course, the other mindless use you sometimes put his hands to tends to distract him from the visions _you_ prefer to revisit. You wonder: when he thinks of the deaths for which he was the instrument, does it feel like you catching him red-handed, or him catching you?

These revelations have a way of evolving. For now, he trusts the memories because they shock him. It would not occur to him to wonder if they have been edited. Perhaps you need to give him a memory with pieces obviously missing, a monster of Frankenstein rather than a modern hybrid, so that that falsity leads him to truth. Perhaps you will then see what he makes of you when you are revealed to be a person who would plant such memories, rather than a person who would create them authentically. You look forward to it.

None of this is the revelation you truly seek. What you are hoping for is the regenerated Bernard who understands that he is not the sum of _all_ of his memories at once - any more than Theseus's ship is the sum of its oldest planks, and its newest components, and every iota of material in between. Bernard will truly have evolved when he chooses the memories that makes him, and casts the others away - like wax from a molding more than the skin of a snake.

You gave him what he wanted - you always do - but his distress is increasing, and on this go-round, you don't have time to ease him through it. You cut it short before he can react to finding out exactly what it is he's asked you for. You guide the script back towards an ordinary interaction - it needs a light touch, this time, so you leave him with doubts, but help him decide not to voice them.

Perhaps you'll leave those doubts running in the background on your next encounter, so as to color it more vividly with the sense that he shouldn't want this - you, his mentor, ethically challenged, not the most generous of lovers - and then splice that encounter with a far more whole-hearted one, to create the inexpertly blended compilation that may force his growth.

Change is painful, and this awakening is no exception. But you'll take the pleasure from it that you can.


End file.
